The invention relates to collectors which receive successively formed severed sections of photographic strip in succession and form an accumulating stack of such sections.
In automated film-processing installations, the photographic strips constituting individual customer orders are typically joined end-to-end, to form a long photographic strip which is automatically processed. After printing, the long photographic strip is severed into short sections, usually containing four to six negatives each. Notch detectors or the like at the cutting station detect cutting marks and end-of-order marks, to assure that the cuts are made between film frames and that individual customer orders are properly separated one from the next. At the end of a customer order, the operation of the cutting station is usually interrupted, to allow the strip sections of the customer order to be inserted into an envelope, or otherwise packaged.
In systems of this type, the successively formed severed sections of photographic strip are conventionally collected by a collector as an accumulating stack of severed strip sections, and then removed by hand and inserted into an envelope.
Commonly owned U.S. Pat. No. 3,762,252 discloses an automatic strip section collector, in which the severed strip sections are conveyed by belts into the collecting gap of a collector unit. To prevent the infed strip sections from being moved through and out of the collecting gap, the gap is provided with an end stop, to retain the infed strip sections in proper position. However, with this collecting system, the leading end of an arriving strip section may push against one of the already collected strip sections and cause one of the already collected strip sections to bend or kink, especially when the strip sections have a high tendency to curl and are not flat in their unstressed condition. However, the development of even one such kink can prevent further infeed of severed strip sections.
In general, the severed strip sections may exhibit the aforementioned tendency to curl and/or transverse and/or longitudinal cross-sectional curvature. These characteristics may be present in different combinations in different strip sections and be present to varying degrees, even within one customer order. As a result, when the successively formed severed strip sections are simply collected in a collecting slot or collecting compartment, the positions they assume will exhibit considerable variation.